No sex till marriage: HIV virus carrier
By KEVIN PAMBA
STUDENTS must delay having sex until proper marriage as a sure way of avoiding HIV/AIDS, a person living with the virus said this week.
“Delay sex until marriage,” Joe Egu, anti-HIV/AIDS campaigner, told fourth year health management students of the Divine Word University in Madang on Wednesday.
“Don’t come to this level I am in now. Sex is not something to experiment by young people,”he said.
“It is a blessed and sanctified activity of God to be enjoyed only in marriage,” he added.
Mr Egu told the students to leave sex till they had completed their studies, found a job and got married.
He told them that they are the pride of their parents, relatives and communities they come from and should return the trust by completing their studies well and avoiding activities that leave them vulnerable to HIV/AIDS.
Mr Egu said people like him are now paying the price of playing around with a sanctified activity of God and having multiple sex partners.
He appealed to the students not to fall into the same trap.
Speaking during a session in the “Working with the Media” class, Mr Egu told the health management students that abstinence from sex is a guaranteed method of avoiding HIV/AIDS which continues to spread in the country despite millions of kina worth of campaigns against it.
He told the students that he is also encouraging young men and women to have HIV/AIDS tests before getting married.
Mr Egu said he has succeeded with several young people who are now happily married after knowing of their HIV/AIDS status to be negative.
He said he is promoting a campaign of the ‘ABCD’, which translates as Abstinence, Being faithful to the husband or wife, Change of behaviour and Delay in sex until marriage.
Mr Egu told the students that the country’s fight against the virus was wrong from the start as it left out and criminalised people living with the virus like him and focused on bland public awareness.
He said the language of fear in the widespread campaign drove infected people underground in shame and despair.
Mr Egu said if the focus was on the people living with HIV/AIDS from the start where the environment was made conducive for them to come out and stop spreading the virus, the disease would not have spread to the present epidemic level.
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